CROPCARE: An Intelligent Real-Time Sustainable IoT System for Crop Disease Detection Using Mobile Vision

Abstract

Agriculture is an important sector that plays an essential role in the economic development of a country. Each year farmers face numerous challenges in producing good quality crops. One of the major reasons behind the failure of the harvest is the use of unscientific agricultural practices. Moreover, every year enormous crop loss is encountered either by pests, specific diseases, or natural disasters. It raises a strong concern to employ sustainable advanced technologies to address agriculture-related issues. In this article, a sustainable real-time crop disease detection and prevention system, called CROPCARE, is proposed. The system integrates mobile vision, Internet of Things (IoT), and Google Cloud services for sustainable growth of crops. The primary function of the proposed intelligent system is to detect crop diseases through the CROPCARE—mobile application. It uses the superresolution convolution network (SRCNN) and the pretrained model MobileNet-V2 to generate a decision model trained over various diseases. To maintain sustainability, the mobile app is integrated with IoT sensors and Google Cloud services. The proposed system also provides recommendations that help farmers know about current soil conditions, weather conditions, disease prevention methods, etc. It supports both Hindi and English dictionaries for the convenience of the farmers. The proposed approach is validated by using the PlantVillage data set. The obtained results confirm the performance strength of the proposed system.